EAST COUNTY ROUNDUP: LOCAL AND STATEWIDE NEWS

October 11, 2017 (San Diego's East County) -- East County Roundup highlights top stories of interest to East County and San Diego’s inland regions, published in other media. This week’s top “Roundup” headlines include:

Doctors are still uncertain if Mike Caster will be able to walk again… On Nov. 2, The Comedy Palace in Clairemont will donate all proceeds from the show to help Caster with his recovery. For more information, click here.

A GoFundMe page has also been set up to help pay for Caster's medical expenses.

A community activist has filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against Lemon Grove City Councilman Jerry Jones and City Manager Lydia Romero, alleging they curtailed his free speech by retaliating against him for comments on Facebook.

debate is nearing a boiling point over whether the city of San Diego should form a government-run alternative to San Diego Gas & Electric — a move that could foreshadow a massive overhaul of electrical markets across California.

Padre Dam Municipal Water District's Board of Directors unanimously approved a contract for the next phase of work on the East County Advanced Water Purification Program. The project, which is expected to produce up to 30% of East County's water by 2023, is a collaboration between Padre Dam, Helix Water District, the City of El Cajon and the County of San Diego.

San Diego officials were informed repeatedly of the dangers of disease-carrying runoff from homeless encampments into area waterways, as far as a decade before the current hepatitis A crisis spurred action.

Workers in charge of maintaining San Diego trolleys say homeless people regularly urinate and defecate inside the trains, and the hepatitis A outbreak across the county has them worried they may be infected.

Thousands of firefighters fought the aggressive march of wind-whipped wildfires that raged out of control Tuesday in Napa, Sonoma, Mendocino and Yuba counties — and the death toll rose to 17 as authorities began the grim task of excavating for bodies amid up to 3,000 ruined homes and businesses. The horror of the disaster was underscored by a desperate effort by people to find relatives who have not been heard from, a problem complicated by downed cell phone towers. In Sonoma County alone, officials had 183 reports of missing people.

As the first reports came in Sunday night of numerous fires that would grow into one of the most destructive wildfire disasters in California history, emergency dispatchers in Sonoma County received multiple calls of power lines falling down and electrical transformers exploding.

…The bill allows most sex offenders to petition beginning in 2021 to be removed from both the public and the police registries 10 to 20 years after they are released from prison, as long as they have not committed another serious or violent felony or sex crime.

…"This legislation gives the state a viable way to help prevent the unthinkable sell-off of our public treasures, such as national parks, national monuments and national historic sites," said state Sen. Ben Allen (D-Santa Monica), the bill's author.

Unprecedented amounts of rain fell across Northern California last winter, ending a damaging drought that reached to the southern edges of San Diego County. The dramatic turnaround was highlighted by a series of powerful, river-like storms that might become more frequent in the future. That’s the thinking of many scientists, including Marty Ralph, director of the Center for Western Weather and Water Extremes at UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and Scripps researcher Alexander “Sasha” Gershunov.